An American Pope will face a fractured American church

The last several months for American Catholics have been a story about the ascent of the Catholic right. In January, a parade of right-wing Catholic power began streaming into President Donald Trump’s remade Washington. Just weeks later came the hospitalization and decline of Pope Francis, who often seemed to stand alone in offering a different vision of global Christian influence.

Vice President JD Vance, a Catholic in the new conservative style, was one of the last people to see Francis alive, a brief meeting between representatives of two contrasting visions for Catholic values in the world.

Then came the stunning arrival Thursday of a new pope: an American, Chicago-born — and a prelate whose priorities for the church seemed to place him in the mold of Francis. He is potentially another countervailing voice against the country’s newly powerful strain of right-leaning Catholics.

The elevation of Robert Francis Prevost, known to some as Bob, to the throne of St. Peter electrified Catholics across his home country Thursday afternoon. But the first American pope arrives at a time of extraordinary complexity and tension in the church in the United States.

Now the new pope, Leo XIV, faces the task not just of shepherding the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, but of unifying a fractured American church where the church hierarchy, ordinary Catholics, an influential right-wing Catholic media ecosystem and Catholic power in Washington are often at odds.

The pope assumes the role at a moment of extraordinary muscle and visibility for a certain kind of Catholicism in American public life. More than a third of the members of Trump’s Cabinet are Catholic. So are two-thirds of the Supreme Court, which has issued a remarkable run of rulings expressing an emphatic vision of religious liberty, often favorable to Christian interests.

The second Catholic president in the nation’s history, Joe Biden, left office just months ago.

The rise of a new right-wing Catholicism in Trump’s Washington contrasts with a broader decline of the presence of the church in American life. Waves of Catholics left the church following revelations of widespread sexual abuse by clergy, and American culture overall has become more secular. Today, about 20 per cent of Americans describe themselves as Catholic, a share that has remained stable over the past decade, according to the Pew Research Center.

Vance, who converted to the faith in 2019, posted his well-wishes to the new pontiff online Thursday afternoon. “Congratulations to Leo XIV, the first American Pope, on his election!” he wrote. “I’m sure millions of American Catholics and other Christians will pray for his successful work leading the Church. May God bless him!”

Trump, who denied posting an image of himself as the pope on his own account on his own Truth Social platform this week, told reporters Thursday that the selection was “such an honor for our country.”

Francis clashed with Trump, most recently and fervently over immigration. In February, just months before he died, the pope harshly criticized Trump’s policy of mass deportations in an open letter to American bishops, calling it a violation of the “dignity of many men and women, and of entire families.” The letter was also seen as an indirect message to other members of the administration, including Vance, who used a Catholic theological concept to defend the administration’s crackdown on immigrants.

Pope Leo is seen as likely to share Francis’ priorities on a range of social issues. An X account that appeared to belong to the new pope reposted a message in April critical of the Trump administration’s “illicit deportation” of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March. The same account has also shared several articles critical of Vance.

“This pope is clearly going to keep speaking out of for justice, for peace, refugees, the poor and the hungry,” the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a longtime Vatican analyst, said. “If this gets him in trouble with the Trump White House, so be it.”

On Thursday night, some right-wing Catholic media outlets were beginning to express skepticism of Leo’s orthodoxy. The website LifeSiteNews published “5 worrying things you need to know about Leo XIV,” written by its editor-in-chief. The list included the new pope’s criticisms of Trump’s immigration policies.

Still, Catholic doctrine does not map neatly onto American political disputes, and it’s not clear whether Leo will have his predecessor’s appetite for sparring. Inserting himself directly into the American political landscape could be thornier for an American.

For some American Catholics, his selection was a sign that the church here is entering maturity. The country is approaching its 250th birthday next year, but the Catholic Church claims an age about 1,750 years older.

The United States was still considered mission territory for the Catholic Church as recently as the beginning of the 20th century, said Kim Daniels, director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University. “A pope from the US is in some ways a sign of our coming into our own in global Catholicism,” she wrote in an email, calling his election “an extraordinary gift” to the life of the American church.

The American church is now the fourth largest in the world, behind those in Brazil, Mexico and the Philippines. The US is the first among them to birth a pope.

For leaders of Catholic institutions and ministries across the country, the selection was a moment of optimism for their church and their country.

“It’s wonderful news, it’s amazing,” said Curtis Martin, founder of the American-based Catholic ministry FOCUS, about the selection of an American pope. The name feels auspicious to him, too: Martin named one of his sons after the turn-of-the-century Pope Leo XIII, who was born in Italy.

Martin said he saw Francis as a leader who excelled at listening, especially to those who did not understand the church or agree with its teachings. He hopes Leo will be able to take the next step, listening but also speaking more directly about church teachings.

“What hasn’t happened yet is the opportunity to enter into a real dialogue,” Martin said. “The church has maybe never listened better than it did under Pope Francis, but now it’s an opportunity to speak.”

He added, “I think Pope Leo might be able to lead that.”

The Rev. Robert A. Dowd, the president of the University of Notre Dame, said he hoped that Leo’s election could prove “a uniting moment” for the American church.

“He’s an American with a global perspective, but he’s an American,” Dowd said. “He understands, I think, the state of the church here in the United States.”

As significant as the moment felt to many American Catholics, the new American pope has spent much of his adult life overseas, in Peru and Italy. Francis, who was born in Argentina, never returned to his own home country as pope, and he visited the United States only once in his 12-year papacy.

Leaders of the American church, who are generally more conservative than much of the global church, expressed their welcome and emphasized that the new pope now belongs to the world.

“Certainly, we rejoice that a son of this nation has been chosen by the cardinals, but we recognize that he now belongs to all Catholics and to all people of goodwill,” Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in a statement. “His words advocating peace, unity, and missionary activity already indicate a path forward.”